Jonathan Miller - The 'trendy Jew': 'Whistle and I'll Come to You' (23/48)

Описание: To listen to more of Jonathan Miller’s stories, go to the playlist:    • Jonathan Miller (Theatre Director)  

Jonathan Miller (1934-2019) was a British theatre and opera director whose work includes a West End production of "The Merchant of Venice" which starred Laurence Olivier and a modern, Mafia-themed version of "Rigoletto". [Listener: Christopher Sykes; date recorded: 2008]

TRANSCRIPT: I can’t remember how I came to do the 'Whistle and I'll Come to You' by MR James. I mean, I’ve never been particularly interested in ghosts. I’m interested in the sociology and the social anthropology of ghosts, of what belief in ghosts consists of and what they represent in terms of mental constructs, that was very fascinating to me. And so I took the story of MR James and modified it tremendously. I didn’t do it... I didn’t literally recreate it as James had written it because actually it’s very... again, it’s rather a mandarin sort of Cambridge don's piece. But it was an opportunity for talking about what it would’ve been like to have been a rational intellectual suddenly exposed to possibly his own fears of the supernatural.

And I was lucky enough to get Michael Hordern to do it, and he played it brilliantly. I wrote... I completely rewrote all the conversations and, of course, then was attacked by another, sort of, English gent for whom I would’ve been, but he couldn’t put it in those words, a sort of trendy Jew, and that was Kingsley Amis, who just attacked it violently.